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To H. W. Bates 15 October [1862]1

Down. | Bromley. | Kent. S.E.

Oct 15th

My dear Mr Bates

I want to hear a little news of you & your Book, & how you & it go on.—2 We have had a wretched summer & have returned home about a fortnight.—3

One of my poor Boys, Leonard, was fearfully ill for two months from effect of Scarlet fever & on our journey to sea-side, Mrs Darwin sickened with the fever & we were detained 3 weeks at Southampton.4 My health has suffered considerably, but I am now slowly at work again.—

When at leisure pray let me have a line, telling me what you have been doing.—

By the way the other day a Mr Edwin Brown of Burton sent me Procs. of N. Ent. Soc. with a letter,5 in which he tells me that he is working at a genealogical classification of genus Carabus.— In answer I told him that you had thought of something of the kind.6

Leonard Darwin became ill with scarlet fever on 12 June 1862 (see Emma Darwin’s diary (DAR 242)). Emma Darwin became ill with scarlet fever in Southampton on 13 August, while on the way to Bournemouth with CD and Leonard; they remained in Southampton until 1 September 1862 (see ‘Journal’ (Correspondence vol. 10, Appendix II)).

Edwin Brown’s letter has not been found. A lightly annotated copy of the Proceedings of the Northern Entomological Society for 28 July 1862, printed lithographically in handwritten script, is preserved in the Darwin Pamphlet Collection–CUL; a paper by Brown ‘on the mutability of specific or race forms’ (E. Brown 1862) is printed on pp. 7–18. Brown argued that while CD had ‘dwelt ingeniously and satisfactorily upon one cause for the alteration of forms of life’, namely, natural selection, he had almost lost sight of other causes, including ‘the direct influences of climate and food, and the accumulative effects of those apparently causeless individual variations that take place at every generation’.